The Government of Japan’s “Society 5.0” initiative aims to create a cyber-physical society in which (among other things) citizens’ daily lives will be enhanced through increasingly close collaboration with artificially intelligent systems. However, an apparent paradox lies at the heart of efforts to create a more “human-centered” society in which human beings will live alongside a proliferating array of increasingly autonomous social robots and embodied AI. This study seeks to investigate the presumed human-centeredness of Society 5.0 by comparing its makeup with that of earlier societies. By distinguishing “technological” and “non-technological” processes of posthumanization and applying a phenomenological anthropological model, this study demonstrates: (1) how the diverse types of human and non-human members expected to participate in Society 5.0 differ qualitatively from one another; (2) how the dynamics that will shape the membership of Society 5.0 can be conceptualized; and (3) how the anticipated membership of Society 5.0 differs from that of Societies 1.0 through 4.0. This study describes six categories of prospective human and non-human members of Society 5.0 and shows that all six have analogues in earlier societies, which suggests that social scientific analysis of past societies may shed unexpected light on the nature of Society 5.0.

In some circumstances, immersion in virtual environments with the aid of virtual reality (VR) equipment can create feelings of anxiety in users and be experienced as something “frightening”, “oppressive”, “alienating”, “dehumanizing”, or “dystopian”. Sometimes (e.g., in exposure therapy or VR gaming), a virtual environment is intended to have such psychological impacts on users; however, such effects can also arise unintentionally due to the environment’s poor architectural design. Designers of virtual environments may employ user-centered design (UCD) to incrementally improve a design and generate a user experience more closely resembling the type desired; however, UCD can yield suboptimal results if an initial design relied on an inappropriate architectural approach. This study developed a framework that can facilitate the purposeful selection of the most appropriate architectural approach by drawing on Norberg-Schulz’s established phenomenological account of real-world architectural modes. By considering the unique possibilities for structuring and experiencing space within virtual environments and reinterpreting Norberg-Schulz’s schemas in the context of virtual environment design, a novel framework was formulated that explicates six fundamental “architectural paradigms” available to designers of virtual environments. It was shown that the application of this framework could easily be incorporated as an additional step within the UCD process.

Abstract-Thanks to the growing sophistication of artificial agent technologies, businesses will increasingly face decisions of whether to have a human employee or artificial agent perform a particular function. This makes it desirable to have a common temporal measure for comparing the work effort that human beings and artificial agents can apply to a role. Existing temporal measures of work effort are formulated to apply either to human employees (e.g., FTE and billable hours) or computer-based systems (e.g., mean time to failure and availability) but not both. In this paper we propose a new temporal measure of work effort based on fractal dimension that applies equally to the work of human beings and artificial agents performing management functions. We then consider four potential cases to demonstrate the measure's diagnostic value in assessing strengths (e.g., flexibility) and risks (e.g., switch costs) reflected by the temporal work dynamics of particular managers. I. THE NEED FOR A COMMON TEMPORAL MEASURE OF WORK EFFORTHE increasing power and sophistication of artificial agent technology is allowing businesses to employ artificial agents in a growing number of roles. Artificial agents are no longer restricted simply to performing logistical functions such as resource scheduling, but are now capable of more complex interpersonal workplace behavior such as using social intelligence to effectively manage the limitations, abilities, and expectations of human employees [1], recognizing and manifesting culture-specific behaviors in interactions with human colleagues [2], and assessing the performance of human members of virtual teams [3]. It is thus gradually becoming more feasible to design artificial agents capable of performing the four key functions carried out by human managers, which are planning, organizing, leading, and controlling [4]. TAs a result of such recent and anticipated future advances, businesses will increasingly be faced with concrete decisions about whether, for example, the manager of a new corporate call center should be an experienced human manager or the latest artificial agent system. Such decisions will be shaped by a large number of strategic, financial, technological, political, legal, ethical, and operational factors. One particular element to be taken into account is that of temporal work effort: i.e., how much time would a human manager actually be able to dedicate to carrying out the necessary work functions, given the fact that physiological, cultural, legal, and ethical constraints limit the number of hours per week that a human being is capable of working? Similarly, how much time would an artificial agent be able to dedicate to carrying out the necessary work functions, given the fact that scheduled maintenance or unscheduled outages can limit the uptime of computer-based systems? Knowing how much time per day (or week, or other relevant time interval) a manager will be available to carry out his or her functions of planning, organizing, leading, and controlling becomes espe...

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are offering new avenues for economic empowerment to individuals around the world. However, they also provide a powerful tool that facilitates criminal activities such as human trafficking and illegal weapons sales that cause great harm to individuals and communities. Cryptocurrency advocates have argued that the ethical dimensions of cryptocurrency are not qualitatively new, insofar as money has always been understood as a passive instrument that lacks ethical values and can be used for good or ill purposes. In this paper, we challenge such a presumption that money must be 'value-neutral.' Building on advances in artificial intelligence, cryptography, and machine ethics, we argue that it is possible to design artificially intelligent cryptocurrencies that are not ethically neutral but which autonomously regulate their own use in a way that reflects the ethical values of particular human beings -or even entire human societies. We propose a technological framework for such cryptocurrencies and then analyse the legal, ethical, and economic implications of their use. Finally, we suggest that the development of cryptocurrencies possessing ethical as well as monetary value can provide human beings with a new economic means of positively influencing the ethos and values of their societies.